This concluding chapter covers how technology and other emerging trends might affect the defining of role requirements, attracting the right candidates, sifting, interviewing, and other assessment methods.
This book reflects current best practice in recruitment, with a view to helping recruiters to succeed in appointing the best candidates for the job. However, this is in a context which is constantly, and rapidly, changing. Technological developments mean that we are able to use approaches in recruitment which were not possible a decade ago. Developments in behavioral science mean that we are increasingly aware of the impact of bias when making recruitment decisions, and of the need to reduce this in order to ensure that recruitment decisions are as rational and objective as possible. So it’s an evolving picture.
I will conclude by considering emerging trends in recruitment, and how best practice may evolve over the next few years.
Defining Requirements for the Role
Traditionally requirements were defined by a job description, setting out the purpose and main tasks of the role. Candidates were then assessed on the basis of their experience in carrying out those tasks, and the candidate with the most relevant experience was appointed. Younger candidates would have the opportunity to be taken on as apprentices, and learn from their more experienced colleagues.
The problem with these approaches are that they are essentially backward looking, in a fast-changing world. Experience of doing things in a particular way over many years may not relate to how they will need to be done in the future. Nor do people with many years’ experience necessarily bring the required attitudes to their work. They may become cynical, disillusioned, or just bored—not the people you want to be influencing your apprentices. They may also feel threatened by and be suspicious of new working methods and, in the worst instances, seek to undermine them.
So paying excessive regard to experience in the recruitment process has demonstrable risks. In response to these there has been a move away from recruiting on the basis of candidates’ ability to meet the requirements of a job description, to an increased emphasis on person specifications. As already discussed, the person specification focuses on the qualities of the individual alongside the requirements of the job. Alongside experience it specifies qualifications required for the role, enabling recruiters to see whether a candidate has invested time in their continuing professional development, and keeping their qualifications up to date. It looks at whether they have the underpinning knowledge to be effective in the role, and again, what they have done to keep this up to date. Most crucially the person specification defines the competencies required to be effective in the role, and provides candidates with the opportunity to provide evidence of how they have demonstrated these.
However, there remains a concern that person specifications still essentially look backwards. This can be addressed to some extent by including competencies such as the ability to adapt to change, or to new working methods, and to test candidate’s ability to respond effectively in these situations. But there remains a concern that candidates with less experience, but greater long-term potential, may still be missing out.
In order to address this some organizations are now going beyond the use of person specifications and developing “success profiles,” which provide a fuller and more rounded picture of the attributes required for the role. The five elements of a success profile are:
- Strengths—the strengths required in a role; that a job holder would need to feel motivated by, do regularly and do well, in order to succeed in the role.
- Behaviors—the actions and activities that result in effective performance in the job.
- Ability—the aptitude or potential to perform to the required standard.
- Experience—the knowledge or mastery of an activity or subject gained through involvement in it over a period of time.
- Technical—the demonstration of specific professional skills and knowledge (may be evidenced through relevant professional qualifications).
When devising success profiles recruiters should look ahead and identify the attributes required to do the job effectively over the next three to five years, instead of looking backwards at how the job has been done in the past.
When drafting person specifications and success profiles, the importance of paying close attention to the language used is increasingly being recognized. The “tech speak” used to describe specialized roles may only be accessible to people who already have experience in that sector, once again meaning that you may fail to reach people with more long-term potential. In many sectors technical roles have historically been filled by men, leading to gender bias in the recruitment process, due to the tendency for people to recruit in their own image. Changing the language used when talking about these jobs is one way of starting to address the problem and appeal to a wider workforce. Software Company Atlassian reported an 80 percent increase in the global hiring of women after analyzing and changing the language used in its job advertisements.
Through taking this broader approach to defining role requirements, it should be possible to strike a better balance when making assessment decisions, taking into consideration potential alongside experience.
Attracting the Right Candidates
As reflected in Chapter 3, the days of drafting an advertisement and placing it in a newspaper or trade journal, then sitting back and waiting for applications to flood in, are long gone. The Internet, and particularly social media, are transforming the ways in which people look for opportunities, and recruiting organizations need to be responsive to this.
With figures suggesting that up to 49 percent of employed Americans are looking for new jobs on social networks, it is hardly surprising that 55 percent of companies plan to increase spending on utilizing social media for hiring. Where you make this investment depends on the nature of the applicants you are trying to attract. If you are looking for business professionals, then business-focused sites such as LinkedIn will enable you to attract the right applicants. An increasing number of companies are not only using LinkedIn to identify potential employees, but are also sifting and shortlisting on the basis of people’s LinkedIn profiles.
If, on the other hand, you wish to reach a broader range of applicants, including people who may not currently be in work, then sites such as Facebook may provide the right vehicle. And if you wish to attract a younger workforce, then WhatsApp or Snapchat may be more helpful in reaching the right demographic.
Advertising vacancies should only be one part of your organization’s social media presence. There should be a wider strategy of building the organization’s social media profile, making people aware of your organization’s vision, values, and achievements. If this is done well then you will become an organization that people actively want to work for, with potential candidates contacting you about opportunities before they even arise. These contacts should be recorded on a database, and invited to apply when it is time for you to recruit. Other applicants will see your advertisement and be able to make a quick decision about applying for a post with your organization, on the basis of what they already know about you from your social media profile.
So in the main, judicious use of social media is likely to be the key to attracting new talent and making people aware of opportunities when they arise. One exception to this may be in international recruitment where, in developing nations, access to the Internet remains less widespread than in more developed economies. If the applicants you are targeting do not have easy Internet access then you will need to find other ways of reaching them, as discussed in Chapter 12. However, the World Wide Web is, increasingly, as the name suggests, worldwide, and the future trend will be toward methods that utilize the Internet effectively.
Sifting
Technology is increasingly a feature of the sifting stage. It has the logistical benefits of streamlining processes and reducing the time demands made on recruiters, who usually have to find time for their involvement in recruitment alongside their other responsibilities.
It may be suggested that removing human input from the sifting stage can be seen as a benefit. As we have seen, humans risk falling foul of all sorts of forms of conscious and unconscious bias, whereas technology is seen as neutral. However, as reflected in Chapter 4, technology is not immune from bias. After all, it is programmed by humans! So there is a risk of technology perpetuating existing norms in the sector, and discriminating against high potential candidates who differ from these.
So at the moment the technology is flawed, but plenty of tech companies are working on developing artificial intelligence–enhanced selection tools with a view to addressing these risks. These include gamified psychometric tests, and the development of algorithms which are designed to balance diversity requirements with quantifiable data on individual performance.
Where human input continues to be involved in sifting, there are steps that can be taken to increase fairness and reduce the risk of bias. Research suggests that better recruitment decisions are made when three or more people are involved in making decisions, particularly if they are a diverse group from different roles and levels within the organization. If these individuals come to their initial decisions independently, and are encouraged to question and challenge each other’s decisions, then the chances of reliable sift decisions are increased. In order for this to happen organizations need to create a culture where senior people are positive about the benefits of being challenged.
Use of approaches such as blind recruitment are likely to increase, where sifters do not have access to biographical information about applicants, meaning that decisions are made solely on the evidence of their abilities to do the job. However, technology has also enabled an opposing trend, where applicants are sifted on the basis of video evidence uploaded from their mobile phones. This may be helpful if you are looking for candidates who display particular behaviors or characteristics; for example, extrovert behaviors in the hospitality industries. This, of course, opens the doors to just the kind of instantaneous, and potentially biased, decision making, that approaches such as blind recruitment are designed to address. So the debate is likely to rumble on.
Interviewing
The trend in interviewing is toward the use of a blended approach, which is a particularly good fit with the use of success profiles in defining role requirements. The use of a blended interview, often alongside other assessment methods, enables a diverse range of criteria to be tested.
As discussed earlier in this book, structured interviews are proven to be more reliable in generating reliable evidence of a candidate’s abilities than other types of interview. But in many instances they have become predictable and formulaic, enabling candidates to reel off well-rehearsed answers which provide panel members with what they want to hear. They do not test a candidate’s ability to think on their feet, and respond to a question which they may not have anticipated; or test their ability to apply their skills effectively across a range of situations.
There is also some evidence that, in some quarters, the competency-based approach is considered outmoded. Some organizations have addressed this by simply rebranding their competencies as “behaviors,” and ended up testing much the same things as before. It is more realistic to recognize the benefits of using a competency-based approach, while also recognizing that a strictly defined interviewing approach of constantly testing competency-based criteria with a repetitive range of behavioral questions can act as an unnecessary constraint on interviewers.
Blended interviews allow competencies (or behaviors) to be tested at interview alongside other criteria such as strengths, technical knowledge, and experience. “What would you do if?” questions can be used to test those candidates who have potential, but as yet lack the relevant experience. The outcome of such an approach is a broader picture of the candidate’s abilities than that gained through a purely behavioral interview.
Aligned with increasingly diverse panels, as for the sifting stage, this approach should provide a process that is both fairer and more reliable than those used in the past.
Technology is also changing the way in which interviews are conducted. Swedish company Furhat Robotics has even developed a robot interviewer, named Tengai, which is able to ask questions to candidates and react to their answers. Tengai’s creators claim that she is free of the biases and prejudices which afflict human interviewers although, as we have already discussed, that will depend on who is programming the robot in the first place. Her opening question:
Have you been interviewed by a robot before?
As video conferencing becomes increasingly reliable, candidates can be interviewed from anywhere in the world. This is likely to increase still further with the development of three-dimensional hologram projections. With these technological leaps remote interviewing will become increasingly common, reducing both the financial and environmental costs of unnecessary travel.
Other Assessment Methods
Alongside blended interviews, organizations are increasingly utilizing a range of assessment methods to get a fuller picture of candidates’ abilities. We have seen some of the ways in which technology will change how candidates’ abilities can be assessed. Gamification will make simulations increasingly realistic, and by building assessments into these programs we can again reduce the risk of assessor bias. Alternatively, it will also become increasingly easy to see how candidates cope in real-life situations, instead of having to use simulations. Candidates will be able to upload videos of themselves carrying out relevant activities, using technology such as smartwatches and platforms such as Snapchat.
Whether or not they use technology, corporations are increasingly going beyond the interview and using a variety of methods to assess their candidates. TGI Friday look for candidates who can generate the “Friday’s feeling”—difficult to assess just through an interview. So their assessment process involves two days of interviews and a range of activities, with a view to testing candidates’ creativity, ability to engage with customers, and ability to work effectively as a member of a team. The length of the process is as significant as its content, in differentiating between those candidates whose enthusiasm is short-lived, and those who are able to sustain it.
The approaches you use depend on the nature of your organization—not every business needs an all singing and dancing team of extroverts. But if you do, then you’d better test their ability to sing and dance. And if you don’t—then you need to define clearly what you do need, and put in place the right combination of activities to test for it.